Vidjama Gmaes Work

The most product to ever product.

I’ve spent the last week not playing Veilguard like I originally wanted but playing through Funko Fusion. At least as much of it as my brain could handle which includes beating 4 of the 7 worlds entirely and completing at least level one of the other 3. And then I went back to start grabbing collectibles I couldn’t get to in earlier levels and barely got through Scott Pilgrim level 1 before putting down my controller, uninstalling the game, and putting the disc in the mailbox back to Gamefly.

Funko Fusion isn’t art. The best comparison I can give to Funko Fusion are those awful Friedberg Seltzer parody movies from the mid-late 2000s. If you remember those awful days of parody, you’ll know what I’m talking about. The Friedberg Seltzer movies didn’t so much parody other movies as they did affirm they knew of their existence. In fact many of the movies they parodied weren’t even out at the time they were written into the script. Surface level references like Iron Man coming out and saying “I am Iron Man” and then getting crushed by a cow.

Funko Fusion feels like a book report written by someone who clearly didn’t read the book and only had time to watch the trailer for the film. There are seven overworlds with five levels in each world and some cameo levels you’ll need to unlock within those worlds for silly stuff like Back to the Future or Five Nights at Freddy’s. Similar to Lego games, each world has a ton of collectibles you’ll have to get further into the game to unlock the tools to go back and pick up.

I do have to give credit to the real winners of this game; the art team. The people who made the assets and set up the art put forward a passion and talent that frankly this game doesn’t deserve. Like comparing the animation quality of Adam Sandler’s Eight Crazy Nights to everything else, like the script and voice acting. If I had to imagine what a Funko video game would look like, well this game is what my brain and probably yours would come up with.

Meanwhile the weak links are the actual game design team. A lot of my time in Funko Fusion was spent wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do next, as nothing is explained well and it’s hard to tell if the game simply softlocked or if you’re just stupid. In the first Hot Fuzz level for example the game told me to follow the swan which I did. And then the swan stopped moving but the mission didn’t update. Turns out I actually had to go and speak to Tim from the movie so the piece of building could fall on his head and continue the story.

Shooting in this game is awful, and I’m pretty sure the aim-assist option is completely broken as having it cranked up to 100% changed absolutely nothing about the way the game controls. The whole combat system is mind-numbingly tedious with most enemies having far too much health. You have two flavors of enemy; melee and ranged, and that’s it for the entire game. They change their skins, yes, but they are fundamentally the same enemies.

Which goes into the other lazy design choice around some bosses whose only gimmick is to just spam the shit out of the field with explosives, ground-pound attacks, and large quantities of mobs that attack you from behind. I particularly hated the fight against the Katayanagi twins in Scott Pilgrim, whose twin dragons spend the whole round coating the ground in explosives while you run around frantically trying to haul parts for your amp to get to the next stage.

Funko Fusion takes all of its presentation and loads it to the point of tedium. Combat would be serviceable at best if not for the game throwing too many enemies at you and making them just bullet spongey to be annoying. Puzzles would be more appreciated if the game had more variety and didn’t drown you with one or two puzzle variants for five straight levels. Boss fights might be interesting if they weren’t the exact same formula of shooting the purple blobs off and collecting them into a jar while endless minions attack you. Puzzles themselves often involve the tedium of hauling things from one part of the map to another.

One thing I will say to the game and developer’s credit is that Funko Fusion is getting a lot more support than I expected. The developers are pretty consistently updating the game and tweaking things here and there, adding new characters, releasing a ton of free DLC characters, and more. Maybe they’ll update the combat so it isn’t completely shit, or offer more accessibility options including turning down enemy health. About 40% would do me just fine thanks.

How about updating the tooltips so the game actually explains some of the more important functions and I don’t have to go to YouTube to have it explained?